Movement That Streams

Have you ever tried watching an hourlong dance performance online, start to finish, without interruption? It’s not easy, at least for anyone mildly distractible. As the choreographer Annie-B Parson recently wrote in a Facebook post, “Watching one minute of anything on YouTube feels equivalent to an hour in the three-dimensional world.”

In this age of multitasking, a great virtue of live performance is that you can’t fast-forward, open a new tab or check your email as it unfolds. Your mind may wander, but it can’t stray too far. Yet even the most devoted dancegoers can’t see everything live. It’s expensive, time consuming and often geographically impossible: Outside major cities, there’s not much live dance to be seen.

In recent years, a few enterprises have attempted to replicate the vividness of live performance online, to create accessible channels for high-quality, well-documented dance. One of the most innovative is OntheBoards.tv, a four-year-old venture of the Seattle organization On the Boards, which presents experimental dance and theater. A team of videographers works with selected artists to produce high-definition, thoughtfully framed films of their work. The result, so far, is a small but growing library of gorgeously shot performances recorded at On the Boards and elsewhere: the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Tex.; Performance Space 122 in New York; and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon.

It’s not free, but the price of admission (of which the artists get a cut) is reasonable: $5 to stream a film (a 48-hour rental), $15 to download one and $50 for a year of unlimited streaming. (Separate prices apply for academic institutions.) For me, the streaming quality — I rented Beth Gill’s “Electric Midwife” — was frustratingly choppy. It was worth the extra $10 for a glitch-free copy that I can watch anytime.

For tangled legal and cultural reasons, putting dance online seems to be easier and cheaper in Europe. At the wondrous Numeridanse.tv, a project of Maison de la Danse in Lyon, France, theaters and cultural centers pool their dance archives — performances, interviews, documentaries — making them fun, free and educational to browse. Unlike the boutique collection at OntheBoards.tv, this is a vast labyrinth where you can click around, bouncing from unabridged works by Ohad Naharin to historical oddities to snippets of the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in rehearsal.

A smaller, simpler trove resides at UbuWeb, an avant-garde gold mine spanning many disciplines. With so many gems beneath the bare-bones interface, a dance scavenger can easily get lost.